High-impact journals are more likely to retract papers because they promote risky research behavior.

Two editors from biomedical journals have found that journals with high-impact
factors are more likely to publish retractions than those with lower impact
factors.

Using the biomedical citation database PubMed, Infection and Immunity
editor-in-chief Ferric C. Fang and mBio editor-in-chief Arturo Casadevall
developed a “retraction index” by dividing the number of retractions by the
number of total articles published by 17 scientific journals between the
years 2001 and 2010. The journals selected had a wide selection of impact
factors, ranging from 2.00 to 53.484, as calculated by Thomson Reuters
Journal Citation Reports. Fang and Casadevall found a strong correlation
between a journal’s retraction index and its impact factor.

IMAGE Two editors from biomedical journals have found that journals with high-impact factors are more likely to publish retractions than those with lower impact factors.

“We’re not surprised to see that high-impact journals had more retractions,
that’s consistent to what we’ve seen before,” said journalist Ivan Oransky
who publishes a blog called Retraction Watch that reports on retractions
from scientific journals. “It’s very useful to have that retracted index
plotted out because a lot of people aren’t quite thinking about it that
clearly.”

Because high-impact journals focus on publishing influential research, these
journals are more likely to publish questionable research that could
potentially lead to paradigm shifts in their fields, according to Fang and
Casadevall. While these journals have become targets for researchers who
take short-cuts, withhold data, and distort images for personal gains such
as job opportunities, grant money, and recognition, many retractions also
occur because of innocent methodological errors.

“There’s a lot of emphasis on journals that retract articles because of
scientific misconduct,” said Fang. “But a substantial proportion of articles
are not retracted because of misconduct, but rather because of other aspects
of the work that are called into question such as [an] incorrect reagent or
a methodological problem–something that causes the authors to question their
conclusions and makes them feel that it would potentially be misleading to
the scientific community.”

But another major problem with these retractions is that they are not highly
publicized.

Because a retracted article can remain in databases such as PubMed without any
notice, such a paper could continue to acquire citations, driving up the
impact factor of the journal that published it.

“It’s important to be transparent about the reasons for a retraction. If it
was a bad reagent, what was that reagent? If there was a problem with the
data, if there was a suspicion that the particular data were inappropriately
manipulated—I think all of that information is in particular interest of the
scientific community and should be made known,” said Fang.

Fang and Casadevall developed the retraction index after Infection and
Immunity retracted six articles from a single laboratory earlier this year.
These retracted articles included manipulated numbers, unreliable findings,
and plagiarism.

“I think retractions, in almost all cases, are a tragedy even if there’s no
misconduct,” said Fang. “Where a paper has to be retracted represents a huge
amount of wasted effort and resources on the part of many people.”

The complete paper, “Retracted science and the retraction index,” was
published August 8 in Infection and Immunity.